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Microsoft Office 12 Beta 1 Is Out
lastberserker writes "The first official beta of the next MS Office is out. PC Magazine already has review with screenshots. Check these blogs for more details on new UI, new file format, and the killer app; plus much more in your friendly neighborhood Wikipedia." From the PC Mag review: "Instead of the cluttered, hard-to-navigate interface that sprouted up haphazardly over the past 20 years, Office 12 introduces a new interface based on tabs that organize sets of functions under headings such as 'Write,' 'Page Layout,' and 'Review,' plus a combination toolbar-and-menu called the ribbon, which displays a different set of icons and menu items depending on the tab selected, and displays different sets of icons depending on whether you're working with text, graphics, tables, or other kinds of data."
FTFA: "Word and Excel still perform automated changes that you may not want or expect, and you still have to learn their sometimes-obscure inner logic before you can master them." It still thinks it can create my document better than I can. No thanks. doc
I have not found many useful thing added to MS office since Office 95. I highly doubt this will be any different.
go with open office
it is cross platform and standards compliant.
the training issue looks like it will get thrown out because you will have to send joe/jane user to training. so might as well send them to open office training and get out of the upgrade cycle.
The new interface has nothing to do with being better. They have a competitor which looks just like it... Coincidence huh? Bollocks it is. The new interface is to break that link. Car manufacturers do exactly the same.
Deleted
One thing I will give MS credit for, is the ability to make their GUIs look like their old GUIs (so my XP machine looks a lot like Windows 98 to the casual observer). Maybe there is a "look like that crappy old version of Word that you're used to" option. That would be ok.
* Please don't suggest I switch programs and use something like Quark, InDesign, or a free and better WP program. I am forced by the tyranny of standards to use Word.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
This is one of the first things that Microsoft has done to innovate the UI since the original wysiwyg style interface. This type of interface is known as a wygiwys (What you get is what you see) the reverse of what you see is what you get. Basically the stuff you write gets morphed into the options you choose giving you a better feel for the end result check this link out http://www.useit.com/alertbox/wysiwyg.html Sounds good.
Let this be a lesson to the openOffice people. Many people, including myself, have said time and again that openOffice should not be copying Microsoft Office, but instead try to be original and just be a great office suite. By copying MS Office, you are just letting Microsoft define the rules of the game, and you'll always be playing catch-up.
Now office 12 is out, and they've completely redesigned the interface. openOffice have three options:
1) Keep their current interface, and risk looking very outdated in a few years.
2) Put masses of effort and wasted time into copying the new interface, and let MS keep defining the rules of the game.
3) Start to be original and concentrate on making a great and original product.
All the above applies to file formats as well. So much of the effort but into being compatible with MS's horrible formats could have been better spent elsewhere.
Firefox did not become a great browser by copying IE, it did so by being a well designed product and adding original, easy-to-use features.
From the sound of it, this shiny new UI adds some long-awaited convenience for users.
/. ?) have been annoyed for many years at all the subtle but irritating changes from version to version of Word & Co. Yes, there are compatibility switches, but they only lighten the pain, they don't relieve it completely.
On the other hand, it also means that OO.org, which has been playing catch-up on the GUI front, will want to go back to the drawing board yet again.
Also, users will once again need to learn new gestures and procedures. Some people, such as my girlfriend (oops - what am I doing on
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
I'm not certain whether these interface changes will be for the better or not, but it is nice to see Microsoft trying to use design improvements and (dare I use the "i" word?) innovation to sell their new Office suite, rather than simply breaking their document formats yet again, which forces everybody to update in order to keep up with any customer who might have recently bought a new computer.
Not that I care much. I like Excel for my spreadsheets, but for everything else I prefer other tools. It would take an awful lot to get be to switch back to Word, Access, PowerPoint or Outlook at this point.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Really it looks like they have attempted to improve the interface, bringing common tasks that where hidden several menus down to the top.
On the other hand the interface looks so alien to the old one I can see this being a support nightmare for large companies where some users have not mastered using the left mouse button yet, let alone understand anything other than picking the menus they where shown long ago and repeating..
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
What are the training costs and migrations costs with this new Office suite? If you just are about to spend some retraining costs you might as well spend it on a free alternative with no vendor lockin, especially since youre changing document format. Why lock oneself in again.
Most of my users know Office by their picture memory, they never read what the toolbars say. The change for Office 12 will be bigger than the change to OpenOffice. I suspect thats the case for most users. Its going to be fun watching Microsoft talk about costs for switching to OpenOffice and at the same time tout the virtue of migrating to Office 12, without mentioning the very same costs.
HTTP/1.1 400
But I'm still using Office 2000 and still havn't seen a single reason to upgrade. And as an IT manager I've kept our office running Office 2K and I've yet to see a single reason to continually update.
I'm not saying O2K is perfect, but to justify any cost to upgrade has to be significant, and I'm just not seeing it.....
don't wine
(pun intented)
[Burn karma burn!]
ERR 411[Max number of witty sigs reached]
First - I love Microsoft Office. I have been a Microsoft Office lover since Excel was released on Mac. I also love Open Source, but still prefer my Microsoft Office 2004 for MacOS X.
Secondly - Office 12 is suicide. Ordinary users hate GUI changes. It doesn't matter if the new GUI is good or not. There are probably tens of thousands of users here on Slashdot that agree on the problem of persuading people to make even a small jump from Windows 2000 to XP - or even worse the impossible switch to Linux or Mac.
Microsoft fumbling with Vista and Office 12 is to become the worst business miscalculation ever made, and our grandchildren will read about it in Economics 101.
...If the new interface catches on. The reviews of it sound positive so far but it remains to be seen if average users will accept it or not. I was speaking to a friend who works in a large corp. They spend a lot of time training non-techies to use Office (and other apps) and a wholesale change in the UI is going to be difficult to roll out. It will require retraining everyone. If the new UI is indeed more intuitive, perhaps that isn't as big an issue but it is still going to require a lot of training. ...What this does to competitors like OpenOffice. Right now they are chasing the tail lights of office. They look and act a lot like it. If Office changes radically as it appears to, that seems to move the goalposts. It will be interesting to see how they respond. Do they clone this new interface paradigm or do they continue with the old, cluttered one?
Not to whin(g)e, but tweaking modelines in XF86Config(-4) is straightforward.
Learning where Microsoft stashed the things you need to click on/off *this time* is not.
Microsoft Products are the girl nobody wants to date (for a good reason). She thinks that all she needs is some more makeup, the *right* designer handbag, and some extra-pointy shoes, and then the guys will like her. She goes out in public. Some guy (who can't tell the difference between a plastic-queen and a real woman) sees her and approaches. She passes the pointy-shoe, hangbag, and makeup test.
These judgements are all rendered as "crotch-jerk" reactions at 50 feet/meters.
After three months of unraveling the faux surfaces, it becomes clear that there are serious mental and behavioural deficits that explain the need for excessive coverup, putty, and denial.
Meh. I think the Ribbon functionality, which is merely a 2005 version of the text help menus in Wordstar et al from the 80's, will actually remove a lot of the frustration of using Office for the casual user such as me.
The point in its favour are:
- no more crappy small icons on THIRTY possible toolbars
- all commands are available in the ribbon
- the ribbon scales to lower and higher resolutions
- irrelevant crap is hidden until you active something that makes it relevant
It's probably the best item of UI engineering to come out of Microsoft ever, fixing the Office toolbar nightmare.
Is it ideal? Who knows. Maybe there is a better UI for providing access to a thousand possible commands within an application in a point-and-click manner, but nobody has bothered to implement it yet.
Sounds like you should just stick with an AS400 box and call it good. Upgrades and changes are the lifeblood of software development, if you cant keep up, then get out of the business.
I haven't done enough reading on the Ribbon concept... I did skim over the blog discussing it a little. Would you say it was at all similar to the changing menu at the top of the primary display screen in MacOS? It changes based on the application that is active in the foreground. It's annoying and a bit confusing at times... at least to me. If those annoying similarities exist on "the ribbon" then I'm pretty sure I'll hate that too. Good thing I have no intention of deploying this on my network any time soon.
I see your point, but I don't think OOo is the impetus for this. In this market, Microsoft's biggest competitor is quite literally themselves. Think about it... what can convince millions of users to pay hundreds of dollars each to upgrade from the last version of Office, which is working just fine? Only a massive overhaul like this. The other thing they could try is just cramming more features into an already bloated application, but the average user doesn't give two shits about the latest and greatest obscure print layout / macro / collaboration enhancement junk.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
You folks are all the same. "Office sucks! The UI is terrible! Why don't they fix it!". When Microsoft attempts to fix it, you cry "Oh my God! They're changing the UI!"
In other words, you want them to fix the product without actually changing anything.
While I know what you mean, I'm not sure you're being completely fair. As I understand it, MS managers monitored requests for new features in Office, and discovered that an overwhelming majority of the requests were for features that were already there.
The new UI is supposed to make it easier for users to locate features, and it actually looks like it will make the apps more usable.
I have found reading the comments on this thread extremely funny. What I thought to myself reading the article is that the Slashdot crowd with either...
a.) Heckle the new interface as looking stupid/being ignorant/taking up too much space on the screen
b.) Talk about how the interface change will be an opportunity for OpenOffice
I am not surprised to be proved correct. Here is what is really going to happen with the new Office. First, they will have an option in there to make it look like Office XP/2003 for those that want it. I watched a video with an interface designer from MS who said as much and it makes sense - they have always provided a way to make newer software look/behave like it's previous versions (2000->XP interface for example). Second, as they have incorporated more and more new features to Office over the years the menus and toolbars has gotten very cluttered. I find it makes perfect sense to me for Office to step back and reasses/reorganize the interface and how people use it to make getting to these options a little more intutitive as well as take advantage of the increased screen realestate that many newer monitors/flatpanels provide. I have an LCD where, at my resolution, the toolbar icons are almost too small these days. I would also like the idea of Office tailoring it's interface to the task I am trying to accomplish and helping me see what options are most common and really relevant and useful for my current what I am trying to do. This is, by many accounts, the peak of Office and it's userbase so if there is ever a time that they could leverage that to have people learn a better and more impressive interface it is now.
I like the new interface and I am going to buy the $150 Student/Teacher version when it comes out. I think that, unlike the differnce between 97, 2000, XP and 2003 where the feature differences are about office and document collaboration and other rather unsexy little sorts of things many users did not need/use, this version is about a nice looking new interface and capabilities to more easily create nicer looking new documents, charts and presentations with more eye candy. I think that you are all wrong - they changed this in a way that will get people excited about Office again and that they can easily tell the difference between it and the old versions in such a way that will have some word-of-mouth advertising between friends and coworkers who will show it off to others and talk about it. For those IT people who posted - I expect there will be a demand for the first time in years from your users and managers will be asking for it and about it.
Instead of rejoicing abuot their coming fall you should realize that this is what MS needed to do to really address OpenOffice and further differentiate themselves and their new version. I really think it will be a large sales success in ways that XP and 2003 was not and a new standard for the other suites to follow. And, most ironically, it will be it for the exact reasons that you all think it will fail.
I have read a lot of posts complaining about how this new GUI is terrible, how there is no consistency, and how people are just going to stick with something familiar. So we are bashing MS for innovating, yet we also bash MS for not innovating enough. Granted they may have gotten the idea to revamp their GUI from someone else, but they did overhaul the interface significantly. We joke and laugh at how MS seems to always be playing catch-up to Yahoo! and Google, how they always take someone else's idea and rehash it with a few tweaks. But now, when they really do something bold and independent, something innovative, we bash them some more for doing exactly what we made fun of them for not doing. Is this just the Linux-Man, MS-haters Club, or can we recognize that MS might have actually improved their product? On a different note, did anyone else notice that the Powerpoint is saved as a .pptx? Looks like we know the code for the new format.
Funtime Candy Wow! - my plan for eventually conquering Japan.
Nah that won't work... companies have tried it many times (although can't think of any in the software field)... usually what happens is that consumers don't upgrade and everyone just sticks with the older product...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places